Self-organization in Science and Society: an introduction

What is STS? Usually we think about science having impact on society: eg cars and sex in 1950s But society has an impact on science: eg the global warming “debate” was largely the creation of oil company funding (cf. t/exxon-exposed.html t/exxon-exposed.html The impact can also be good (as we will soon see) Nature is also in this dielectic: so…

What is STS? The trielectic:

What isn’t self- organization? Top-down: someone in charge organizes stuff Military—general, commander Corporation—CEO Catholic church—Pope Suburban layout—architect Automotive design—designer Computer chip--engineer Fine art—artist Orchestra-conductor What is self- organization? Bottom-up: the stuff organizes itself: Biological evolution Flocks and swarms: bees, birds, whales, wolves, etc. Crowdsourcing: WWW, Wikipedia, Open Source, etc. Subsumption architecture (robotics), Molecular self-assembly (nano),

Why do dictatorships love linear order?

Why do democracies accept disorder?

What about in-between? top-down bottom-up This spectrum exists for many other systems: eg human nervous system combines centralization (brain vs peripheral ns) with self-organization (neural nets) Note that thinking about social structures can help us think about natural structures

How disorganized can self-organization be? Toss a handful of particles in the air: “self-organized” but without order. Trival case Sand waves from wind action: a quasi-ordered emergent pattern. Significant case. Self-organization tends to be a more salient description when describing systems between total order and total disorder Salt crystal forms from evaporating water. Completely ordered. Trivial case.

Top-down tools Bottom-up tools ToolLinearNon-linear Spatial analysisEuclidean geometryFractal geometry DynamicsNewtonian mechanicsChaos theory Collective behaviorStatisticsComplexity theory

Top-down tools Bottom-up tools ToolLinearNon-linear CommunicationShannon-weaver (classical information theory) Network theory (scale-free topologies) OptimizationOperations research (linear programming etc.) Fitness landscape, genetic algorithms Artificial IntelligenceGOFAI (Expert systems, high level symbol manipulation) Neuromimetics, subsumption architecture, etc.

Most theories of self-organizing systems fall under the rubric of “Complexity Theory.” But what is the distinction between Complexity Theory and Theorizing Things that are Complicated? Which is more complex? A gas made of 15 million molecules randomly crashing about? OR A school made of 15 fish gracefully swirling though water?

Emergence is global behavior of a system resulting from collective interactions of loosely coupled components. Temperature: an emergent property of swarms of molecules. But temperature is based on the average velocity of molecules (E=3kT/2). Linear relation, you can use statistics. Flocking: an emergent property of swarms of animals (birds, ants, fish, etc.). Flock movements are not well characterized by averages or statistics. They are nonlinear, adaptive, anticipative, have memory. They have synergy: the whole is greater than the parts. “Complicated” just means there is so much going on we can’t keep track of it Complexity: synergistic emergent behavior; often adaptive (hence “complex adaptive systems”).

But we can go even deeper At the heart of self-organization lies recursion Recursion is also at the heart of many social ideals: democracy, freedom, egalitarianism. Therefore it should be no surprise that some of the founders of self-organization in science were also activists for self-organization in society.